Juvenile Instructor » Miscellaneous

The Juvenile Instructor turns 5 today

By ChristopherOctober 26, 2012

It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since that fateful day at J-Dawgs when five lowly BYU students decided to start a blog devoted to the academic study of Mormon history. Yup, that’s right. The Juvenile Instructor turns 5 today. We’ve added new bloggers (there’s 25 of us now! 25!), regretfully said goodbye to a couple of others, and grown and developed and (hopefully) improved during that time. I’ll offer my own belief that the JI is bigger and better and stronger than it’s ever been. And a lot of that has to do with you, our readers. Among the most regular comments I hear from people about the JI is how much they appreciate and enjoy the quality of conversation that goes on in the comments section, and I tend to agree. For those that have been with us since the beginning, thanks for sticking around. And for those who only recently found the blog, thanks for stopping by. We hope you’ll visit often.

Biographically Thinking

By SC TaysomOctober 25, 2012

I am currently in the early stages of a scholarly biography of Joseph F. Smith. Biographies are sort of strange beasts, largely because they seem deceptively simple. A person lives and then a biographer writes about that life. The reality of course is much more complex. The biographer has to make a great many choices before doing any research at all. Biographers have to decide what sorts of questions they want to answer using the life of their subject. Are the questions just about the subject? Or will the subject be used to demonstrate larger themes? Something in between? What about organization? Thematic? Chronological? As I wade through these and similar questions, I would like to tap the collective wisdom of JI’s readership. As readers, what kind of biographies do you prefer? What are your favorite biographies? What are your least favorites?

“Either a misogynist or proto-feminist”: Women and Polygamy in John Turner’s “Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet”

By AmandaOctober 23, 2012

[Another installment in the roundtable on John Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.]

Amanda's Aunt Ann Eliza, also known as Wife No. 19 and now a star of a major Lifetime Movie

I should mention at the outset of this review that I am not a dispassionate, objective observer when it comes to the subject of Brigham Young and polygamy. In other words, I have a dog in the fight. As a child, my grandmother regaled me of stories of my Uncle Ed?s great grandmother who had divorced Brigham Young and then went on a lecture tour revealing his hypocrisy and tyrannical abuse of his wives. When I was older, I realized that the woman that my grandmother had taken such pride was none other than Ann Eliza Young, the famous nineteenth wife of Brigham Young. The fact that my great uncle?s last name was Webb confirmed the ancestral tie. My adulthood, however, also tempered my feelings about Brigham Young, which had ranged from bemusement at his ideas about Adam-God to disgust at the number of his wives. Although I still joked about what I would like to say to the Mormon prophet if we ever met in the afterlife, I also began realized that he was a man who had loved his children deeply and had experienced a great deal of pain and suffering during his time as a missionary and as a man in Nauvoo. I still remember reading about the aid that he rendered to his daughter Susa after she found herself unable to support herself after divorcing her alcoholic first husband.

Found in the Archives: James Covel in Canada, circa 1818?

By ChristopherOctober 22, 2012

In March of this year, the newly rebranded BYU Studies Quarterly published an article I wrote entitled “Mormonism in the Methodist Marketplace: James Covel and the Historical Background of Doctrine and Covenants 39?40.” The article, which began as a short and poorly-written blog post here at JI a few years earlier, represented the culmination of a year in the archives pouring through manuscript sources and rolls and rolls of microfilmed newspapers and church records from three different Methodist churches (assisted by the indefatigable staff at the United Methodist Archives and History Center in Madison, New Jersey), piecing together the life and preaching career of a man I initially knew next to nothing about. It also represented the culmination—or so I thought at the time—of my research on connections between Methodism and early Mormonism. I’d moved on to what I imagined at the time as an entirely unrelated project: my dissertation, which examines the growth and development of Methodism in North America and the Caribbean from 1760 to 1815.

Found in the Archives: Heidi Harris, “Too coincidental to be merely coincidental”

By HeidiOctober 21, 2012

We’re delighted to feature this contribution from JI’s good friend and former blogger Heidi Harris as part of our “I Found it in the Archives” series.

Brigham Young’s Early Religious Life and Conversion in Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet

By ChristopherOctober 16, 2012

I suspect that most readers of John Turner?s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (and consequently, most readers of this roundtable) are interested primarily in the final thirty years of Young?s life, or at least some aspect of it. It was during that time, after all, that the most obviously exciting, controversial, and significant events in Brigham Young?s own life and the church that he led occurred; it was during that time that Young became the pioneer prophet the book sets out to describe and analyze.

Scholarly Inquiry: Spencer Fluhman answers your questions

By October 15, 2012

J. Spencer Fluhman is assistant professor of History at Brigham Young University. He graduated summa cum laude from BYU with a degree in Near Eastern Studies (1998) and attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was awarded a MA (2000) and PhD (2006) in History. He is the author of the recently-released A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and the editor (with Andrew H. Hedges and Alonzo L. Gaskill) of The Doctrine & Covenants: Revelations in Context (Religious Studies Center, BYU, and Deseret Book, 2008). He also guest edited (with Steven Harper and Jed Woodworth) the , ?Mormonism in Cultural Context.? Dr. Fluhman is also a dynamic lecturer and popular teacher at BYU. He personally mentored several of the bloggers at Juvenile Instructor, and remains a close friend and trusted mentor to the current generation of Mormon graduate students. Below he answers your questions about his recent book, broader researcher, and Mormon history more generally.

Found it in the Archives: Joseph F. Smith?s Patriarchal Blessing

By Nate R.October 13, 2012

Years ago I was combing BYU?s L. Tom Perry Special Collections for materials related to Joseph F. Smith, 6^th president of the Church. I found a number of hidden treasures, including a holograph copy of a patriarchal blessing supposedly given to Joseph F. Smith more than a year and a half prior to his first Hawaiian mission, when he was thirteen years old.

Mulling over Missions and Metrics

By RachaelOctober 11, 2012

With the buzz of the new missionary-age announcement still ringing throughout the blogs, I couldn’t help but muse over the different consequences and implications many are anticipating through this change.

I had a discussion with some friends today over the possibility of further changes we might see in the missionary program?s future.

Female AP?s? Not likely. Equalizing two-year lengths for all? Perhaps. Pantsuits? Why not. De-quantification?

Hm?probably never.

The Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia

By Ben POctober 10, 2012

I’m sure almost everyone has heard the news by now. Today, the University of Virginia has announced the establishment of the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies, which will be housed in the Department of Religious Studies (see coverage here). This chair has been in the works for a while, and it is remarkable how quickly they were able to raise a $3 million dollar endowment, but that just points to the excitement out there for the topic. (It also helps that east coast donors have probably not been hit up for the other Mormon studies chairs out west.)

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Miscellaneous